Assessing Polycentric Urban Systems in the OECD: Country, Regional and Metropolitan Perspectives

Abstract

Contemporary urban systems in OECD countries are structured around functional regions, which often overcome established city-boundaries. Reading space in terms of functional regions allows assessing changes in urban hierarchies and spatial structures, including the polycentricity of urban systems at national, regional and metropolitan scales. By using a harmonized definition of functional urban areas in OECD countries, this paper first provides a sound definition of polycentricity at each spatial scale, highlighting for each of them the different links with policy. Second, it provides measures of polycentricity and explores the economic implications of different spatial structures. Results show that relatively more monocentric regions have higher GDP per capita than their more polycentric counterparts. At the country level, on the other hand, polycentricity is associated with higher GDP per capita.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Joaquim Oliveira Martins, Rudiger Ahrend, Karen Maguire, William Tompson and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and discussions. Authors thank also, for their valuable comments, Roberto Camagni, Roberta Capello and all the participants in the International Seminar on “Welfare and Competitiveness in the European polycentric urban structure: which role for metropolitan, medium and small cities?” that took place in Florence on June 2013. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect those of the OECD or its member countries.

Notes

1 The Sprawl Index could not be computed in Canada, Chile, Korea and Mexico due to the absence of the land use layer in two points in time for these countries.

2 Among the countries included in the analysis, those considered as Eastern European ones are Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovak Republic.

3 In any case, all models show a very low Variance Inflation Factors, which suggest no problems of multicollinearity.

4 All the variables have been computed from the OECD database (http://dotstat.oecd.org/Index.aspx).